Scandalous Nights With the Earl

Chapter One

Phillip James Kellan Moreland, the eighth Earl of Elmsworth, arrived at his estate in Hampshire just after midday on a cold May afternoon, the wind up and heavy rain pooling on the ground.

He could barely look at the place, dark against a leaden sky, the crenulated palisades of stone even more unwelcoming than they had been when he’d left, four years prior.

Home.

The very word made him frown.

His younger brother was no longer in residence.

He’d had a letter from Oliver a few years earlier explaining that his personal circumstances had changed substantially and because of it he had installed a farm manager at Elmsworth in his stead.

The accounts Phillip had looked over briefly in London before returning to Hampshire had shown that the manager was doing a fine job, and he was thankful for such an easy turn of fortune.

Still, he had little heart to be here again.

Gretel, his wife, was dead. Lying under a gravestone four thousand miles away, the earth of another land all around her.

Fisting his fingers, he breathed in hard, glad at least for the solitude and seclusion Elmsworth would bring. He did not wish for conversation, laughter or questions. He did not want to hear once again from some well-meaning soul about how time healed loss and made living easier.

‘Everyone can master a grief but he that has it.’

He remembered these words from his schooling years at Eton. For a while, they had been etched into the wood of a drawer base by the side of his bed. He had put them there himself with the sharp point of his knife, Miranda Moreland’s last letter resting on top.

Mama’s instability had baffled him until finally he’d had enough, and he’d made a paper plane of her last tangled missive on returning home one summer and sent the nonsense into the pond she had drowned in.

Oliver had been more sensible, Phillip thought then, for his brother had read his letter once and then burnt it.

He had no idea as to what had happened to his father’s.

All he did know was that his mother’s sickness had reached out to hurt each of them years after her death and turned them all into people they had not wanted to be.

‘Thun-der-ation.’ He said the word slowly, breaking it into the same drawn-out syllables they seemed to favour in the American south.

But there was no sense in wallowing in all that he had hated here, and at the age of almost thirty-three it was far past time to move on.

The sombre sameness of the place brought everything back, that was the trouble, the inescapable sense of doom making him uneasy.

He knew he had been called the Arrogant Earl in Society because of his distaste for the constant expectations.

But tradition was a hard taskmaster and with the Moreland blood flowing in his veins he had no other pathway available to him but to return to England and make the best of it.

His attention was caught by a carriage that stood on the circular driveway before the manor, looking to all intents and purposes as if it had just arrived.

There were two footmen hovering around the back of the conveyance and a driver was at the front checking on the team of horses whose breath was steaming in the cold.

Visitors. Now? He swore as he stepped down from his own carriage and walked into the house to be met by a group of elderly females all fanned around a younger one lying prostrate on the long sofa in the green salon just off the entrance hall.

He could not see her face but the expressions on those beside her told him there had been some sort of major mishap.

Mrs King, his housekeeper, turned and saw him first, a comical expression of shock widening her eyes and her mouth falling open.

‘My Lord Elmsworth? You are returned home at last?’ Disbelief lay in every word.

The other elderly ladies instantly looked across as well, three sets of identical watery blue eyes fixed upon him.

‘Indeed I have. Is there a problem here, Mrs King?’

The young woman lying down was now visible. Her cheeks were pale and her eyes reddened. As she recognised his presence, consternation appeared on her face. She tried to sit up, swivelling her feet to the floor, and her complexion became paler still.

‘I would lie down again if I were you, Miss…?’

He waited as one of the older women furnished her name.

‘Mrs St Claire, Lord Elmsworth.’

‘And… I am…never…sick.’

This quiet rejoinder from the patient had him observing her more closely.

It was true. She did not give the appearance of one of the thin, pale and fragile butterflies Society lauded.

She was curvaceous, the line of her bodice showing off a generous bosom.

He felt a hot and unfamiliar flicker of interest inside and it shocked him.

‘Well, you are indeed most ill now, my dear.’ The ancient woman nearest to her said this.

‘Because the meal last night…was tainted.’ The patient’s glance met his own, direct and honest and with a good sprinkling of horror within it.

‘She has been sick all night, my lord, and then three times again this morning. She is so sick she cannot keep anything down at all, which is why we called in to your estate for help.’

‘But… I…am…feeling better…’

Phillip saw her chin tremble even as she said it and tried to school the scowl he knew to be on his own face.

‘You should rest for a while.’

The words sounded sharp and short but even as he uttered them her breathing changed, the old woman standing closest grabbing at the bowl on the table and the visitor’s head disappearing as she heaved violently into it.

‘Mrs King, could I have a private word with you?’

‘Of course, sir.’

After making sure they could not be overheard from this far down the passage Phillip spoke softly. ‘If the St Claire party needs to stay tonight, offer them a place to lay down their heads. I will leave it to you to see that they are gone in the morning.’

‘Yes, sir.’

He left then, striding through to his library with intent. God, he did not need another sick woman around him. Gretel’s malady had lingered on and on, until even she was tired of her inability to find peace at the end of it.

There was brandy in the cabinet. His brother had always been an expert on good liquor and Phillip was pleased for the four bottles of vintage cognac lined up on the shelf.

Finding a glass and opening a bottle, he poured himself a liberal amount.

It was good, he thought next, the smooth taste improving his mood.

He’d stay in here till the unwanted group were either departed or settled upstairs and that surely could not be too far away.

With resolve he lifted one of the many heavy farm ledgers down from the shelf behind him and began to read.

The man who had just left was the most beautiful male Wilhelmina Evelyn St Claire had ever seen in her entire life.

Oh, she knew beauty to be a fleeting and shallow thing, and such physical blessings should hardly make a difference to one’s worth, and yet for some reason this man’s looks had her normally far more sensible heart beating at a pace that was worrying.

The fact that such an unexpected Adonis had seen her at her very worst, head in the ceramic basin bringing up that dreadful chicken pie purchased last night from the inn on the road towards London, was something she could hardly change.

So she simply lay back and admitted defeat.

She knew who he was, of course she did. Mr Phillip Moreland, the eighth Earl of Elmsworth may have been unpopular in Society because of his arrogance but nobody had ever disputed his beauty.

She just had not expected his eyes, that was all, filled with a sadness and a sense of guilt that had made the scowl on his face less alarming somehow.

He had his demons, for sure, but he also had that particular and familiar grief that loss left marked upon his body with a howling truth.

He had loved his wife. She had heard that said many times, the beautiful, ethereal, slight and pale Miss Gretel Carmichael, a debutante who had conquered her season like no other woman had before or since. A love match. Rare. Exceptional. Extraordinary.

Her own marriage had been nothing like that.

She could hear the McAllistair sisters talking with the housekeeper. The woman was offering their party rooms for the night, and the chance to recover in comfort until they resumed their journey across to London on the morrow. She stated firmly that it would be of no inconvenience whatsoever.

Did the Earl of Elmsworth know such arrangements were being suggested?

Willa doubted he would, which in itself was intriguing.

Given that the servant did not fear reprisals for such a proposal, she could only assume that Lord Elmsworth was not a master who ruled his roost with an exacting and formidable iron fist. If she had felt even a smidgeon better she would have refused the offer and got back in the carriage, but the waves of nausea were not leaving her and she felt too wrung out for an argument.

The long journey to London was too much to consider and sitting upright and constrained in a moving vehicle would be the very definition of impossible.

She wanted darkness and silence. She wanted to be in a prone position with a soft pillow beneath her aching head and the chance of complete and utter stillness.

She also wanted desperately to be away from the unending and shrill chatter of the three elderly McAllistair sisters.